ProfessorSandy Wilkinson

Sandy Wilkinson is Deputy College Principal in the College of Arts and Humanities and Professor of Early Modern European History at University College Dublin. His research focuses on the history of the book, early modern European print culture, religious and cultural history, and the use of computational methods to study cultural heritage at scale.

His work has been especially concerned with the printed book as a material, visual, textual, and commercial object. He has led major funded projects on the book trade in France, Spain, Portugal, and the wider Iberian world, and on the visual culture of early European print. Across these projects, he has developed large-scale bibliographical and image-based approaches to the study of early modern books, combining traditional historical and bibliographical scholarship with digital methods, computer vision, vision-language models, and AI-enhanced metadata. This work seeks to expand the evidential basis of book history by making visual, textual, material, and bibliographical relationships discoverable across dispersed collections at a scale previously unavailable to the field.

He is currently developing Cultural Heritage Explorer, an AI-assisted cultural heritage platform and MVP for a planned university spinout in December 2026. The platform aims to make dispersed cultural heritage material newly searchable, comparable, and interpretable across texts, images, metadata, editions, languages, and collections.

Within UCD, he has served as Deputy College Principal in the College of Arts and Humanities since 2024. He chairs the College Space and Infrastructure Committee and the Microsoft Migration Liaison Group, supporting major institutional planning, infrastructure, and change-management initiatives. Within the School of History, he chairs committees on Ethics and Academic Integrity.

Sandy studied at the University of St Andrews under Professor Andrew Pettegree, receiving an MA in Modern History with Honours, First Class, an MLitt in Reformation Studies with Distinction, and a PhD. He remained at St Andrews as a British Academy/AHRC postdoctoral research fellow from 2001 to 2006 before moving to UCD as a lecturer in the History of the Media.

His teaching includes modern European history, Renaissance Europe, book history, bibliography, early modern print culture, and digital humanities. He is especially interested in teaching at key transitional moments in the student journey, including first year and Graduate Diploma level. Across his teaching, he is committed to integrating real-world skills into the humanities curriculum, including data harvesting, relational databases, visualisation, Python, deep learning, and the critical application of AI methods to historical and cultural heritage research.

His current research projects include The Art of the Book in the Renaissance and the Enterprise Ireland-funded AI Cultural Heritage Explorer. His funded research includes the French Vernacular Book Project, now part of the Universal Short Title Catalogue; Iberian Books and Ornamento, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and the Enterprise Ireland-funded AI Cultural Heritage Explorer.

He is Chair and founding co-editor, with Bill Bell and Chandrika Kaul, of Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media, and serves on the editorial board of The Library of the Written Word: The Handpress World, published by Brill.